Neon Giant is celebrating the holidays on Veles with a brand new patch and a round of voice-overs for all side mission NPCs in the game. The "Winter Pack" and new voice lines are now available in The Ascent.
Neon Giant teamed up with sound design house Sweet Justice Sound and Altered, developers of Altered Studio, a new AI-powered tool to augment human voices, in an effort to create a range of custom-made voices for new lines of dialogue. The Ascent breaks new ground with the new software that delivers 800 lines of dialogue for 40 different NPCs. The new lines will go to the side-mission NPCs who previously communicated with the players exclusively via subtitles.
The additional voice-over content arrives at Veles today, along with a free "Winter Pack" DLC.
The Ascent update
The latest update now available in the game brings the new voice lines, making all previously subtitled dialogue articulated.
The "Winter Pack" DLC is free to download for all players right now and features a new festive look, a snowball grenade and three season-appropriate outfit pieces.
A new hand grenade:
- Snowball: The new throwable item will only stun your opponents.
Three new fashion items:
- Buttercup headgear: A highly realistic headpiece. Unsettling to say the least.
- Red Danger headgear: it's not NOT a look.
- Festive shirt: A festive shirt.
Fully voiced side missions
Sound design house Sweet Justice Sound used Altered Studio took recordings by a voice-over artist, Sam Hughes, and augmented his vocals to get a spectrum of diverse performances that can later be used to differentiate the multitude of NPCs in The Ascent and give the game additional depth.
Voice actor Sam Hughes, who voiced the 800 new lines of dialogue for The Ascent said: "Hearing someone else acting like me, literally with my performance, will forever be one of the coolest and most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had. It was such a unique opportunity, to be able to bring my performance to even more characters for the game in this way. It’s pretty incredible and the end result is highly impressive".
